Welcome to the BSA’s Placemaking Network! We are dedicated to interdisciplinary dialogue and education about an integrated public realm. Programs include monthly seminars and project-based initiatives on the subject of Placemaking. Presentations by noted speakers and discussions focus on what makes public spaces successful. We examine how architects, landscape designers, urban planners, artists and public officials work together to create great public places, to turn space into place.

Ann Sussman AIA, an architect, author and researcher, will introduce participants to her ongoing research on how buildings influence people emotionally. Biometric tools, like eye tracking, which follows eye movements we don't consciously control, are widely used in advertising and product design today. What happens when we apply the technology to architecture? This talk reviews findings from recent pilot-studies showing how people look at architecture, revealing hidden behaviors that are key to successful placemaking. We will see how 'fixations' or attachments our eyes make without conscious effort direct our behavior around buildings, even influencing our mood and anxiety levels.

In 2014, Gediminas Urbonas chaired an MIT symposium entitled Public Space? Lost and Found and recently co-edited a book of the same title (SA+P Press; MIT Press, 2017). Both symposium and book brought together artists, planners, theorists, and art historians in an examination of the complex interrelations between the creation and uses of public space and the roles that public art plays therein. Urbonas will speak about the definitions of public space and the tools, tactics, and consequences of reclaiming it through architecture and art. He will cite projects that challenge or support ideas of cultural identity, documenting and analyzing public spaces from several locations and cultures in recent history.

Gediminas Urbonas is an artist, educator and co-founder (with Nomeda Urbonas) of Urbonas Studio, an interdisciplinary research practice that facilitates exchange amongst diverse nodes of knowledge production and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries. In collaboration with experts from different cultural and professional fields, these projects develop practice-based research models, merging a variety of materials and techniques from new media, urbanism, social science and ecology.
Urbonas’ work has been exhibited at the São Paulo, Berlin, Moscow, Lyon, and Gwangju Biennales; at the Manifesta and Documenta exhibitions; and in solo shows at the Venice Biennale and the MACBA in Barcelona. Nomeda and Gediminas have been awarded a number of grants and awards, including the Lithuanian National Prize (2007), the honorable mention for the Lithuanian national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007), Best International Artist at the Gwangju Biennale (2006). They were also nominated for the 2012 Nam June Paik Award. Gediminas is Associate Professor and Director of the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology in the School of Architecture and Planning.